Just before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, at the end of the Cold War. Everything is changing in front of Anthi’s eyes and Christos seems to be changing too. Bella is the story of a moment in time recreated as if in a feverish dream where fiction and documentary overlap perfectly, creating a striking and emotional cinematographic universe.
January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.
The stakes couldn't be higher for displaced Palestinian refugees Chatila and Reda in this knife-edge drama. The cousins are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens, but when Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan to pose as smugglers in an attempt to get them out of their desperate situation before it is too late.
An ailing Greek man attempts to take a young, illegal Albanian immigrant home.
Following the wedding of his daughter, stone-faced beekeeper Spyros makes an annual journey from the north of Greece to the south, traveling along with his hives. En route, he meets an erratic, young female drifter, with whom he strikes up an unusual, self-destructive relationship.
After fleeing civil war in Liberia, a formerly-privileged refugee is barely scraping by in her new life in Greece when she strikes up an unexpected friendship with a rootless tour guide.
Revenge is a recurrent theme in thrillers, usually dispensed by action heroes with a well-stocked arsenal. But in Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’s nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas (Manolis Mavromatakis), a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory, which he discusses at length with a local publican. But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums, who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter, our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable. Encouraged by his paranoid, militarist neighbour, Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands, and in doing so begins to understand – for the first time – the world he has been living in. The vigilante movie is a well-explored genre too, but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency, subverting the cliched right-wing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the (imagined) expectations of others. (Source: LFF programme)
Seems like an ordinary trip to a remote beach. Four young women enjoy the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the sea and one another's company. None of them is "Winona"
While having a day-long swim at Athens' queer beach, best friends Demosthenes and Nikitas recall the events of a recent summer in the prospect of turning them into a screenplay for Nikitas' feature debut.
A lawyer, who represents the German government against the Greek reparation claims for Nazi crimes in World War II, travels to Greece and meets one of the remaining survivors of the Kalavryta massacre that took place in 1943.
Elizabeth, a sexually yielding policewoman, is miserable in the narrow-minded town in which she's living. While Rita, a lonely eel-hatchery worker, is trying to escape from the sticky situations of her life.
In a tale rooted in ancient Greek tragedy, a patriarch must decide the fate of his son and the boy he raised when a long-standing unneighbourly feud turns to murder.
Financial upheaval forces a teenage deaf girl, Valmira 16, to leave her progressive Athens school and return to her father's struggling island where she is confronted by the danger of prejudice and intolerance, most shockingly -- her own.
The first part of an incomplete trilogy telling the story of the greek people. The film begins in 1919, with Greek immigrants from Odessa arriving near Thessaloniki. Led by the charismatic Spyros, they establish a new settlement in the delta of a river. The youngest of the settlers are Spyros' son Alexis and an orphan from Odessa, Eleni. A strong, almost incestuous affection develops between the teenagers, resulting in twins who are given to a foster family. Also standing in the way of love is Spyros, determined to take his foster daughter as his wife. The lovers then decide to flee the village, persecuted by their father, leading a life of exile. As Alexis joins a group of musicians planning to go to the United States, Eleni regains custody of the twins. Angelopoulos, as in previous films, looks at the sacrifice of civilians confronted by the workers' demonstrations of 1935, the rule of Metaxas' fascist junta and forced emigration to America, and finally the civil war of 1944-1949.
A railway crossing in the middle of nowhere. Two guards: solitary Yiannis who never leaves his post and cool Antonis who goes with the rhythm of the landscape. Every once in a while, a voice announces the passing of a train. The two guards manually lower the bars. Nothing seems to stir their daily routine until love charges in, crushing all certainties.
A group of young boys must decide whether to buy a TV set to watch the launch of Apollo 11 or visit Uranya to learn about the secrets of love.
An old communist returning to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union is disillusioned with the state of things.
Under the hot Greek sun, animators at an all-inclusive island resort prepare for the busy tourist season. Kalia is the group leader. Paper decorations, glossy costumes and dance shows fill the stage. As summer intensifies and the work pressure builds up, their nights become violent and Kalia's struggle is revealed in the darkness. But when the spotlights turn on again, the show must go on.
A military satire inspired by wild real-life events from the 1990s when, in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of communism, a task force comprised of high-ranking Bulgarian army officers and psychics embarked on a top-secret military operation in the small village of Tsarichina to dig up an elusive alien artifact that would change the course of history and make Bulgaria great again.
Summertime. A family of three, a single father, Babis, and his twin children on the verge of adulthood, Konstantinos and Elsa, sail to the island of Poros on the family boat for their holidays. In the midst of swimming, sunbathing and making new friends, Konstantinos and Elsa meet unbeknownst to them, their birth mother Anna who abandoned them when they were babies. This encounter will stir up long-held feelings of resentment in Babis, resulting in a sun-kissed, bittersweet coming-of-age journey for everyone involved.
